ZIONIST - FASCIST COLLABORATIONtwo examples in
Zionism's history of political cynicism

American Jewish
War Veterans were among those effecting a boycott that threatened tobring the Nazi regime to ruin, until that
boycott was broken by the Zionist establishment.

note from Tom Suarez :

The record of Zionist-Fascist collaboration is very much in the news
these days. To whatever small extent this collaboration is acknowledged
by the pro-Zionist mass media, it is explained as the horrific necessity
of an impossible moral quandary.

Although the horrors of World War II most certainly presented terrible
moral dilemmas for the Allies, such soul-searching fails to explain the
Zionists’ deals with the Axis powers. Indeed, the Zionist leadership’s
record regarding at-risk Jews is not good; consistently, the Zionist
project was the priority. Jews and Jewish persecution served Zionism’s
racial-nationalist ambitions — not the other way around.

Zionism’s working relationships with the Italian Fascists and the German
Nazis form but part of this evidence, but that evidence alone is
powerful enough to threaten the prevailing Zionist narrative. This is
the reason why Ken Livingstone’s comments, however clumsy and imprecise, elicited such
outrage.

So callous were the Zionist leadership to the calamity of fascism in
Europe that it sought to keep Jews from joining the Allied struggle
until it served Zionist needs (hence the so-called Jewish Brigade, not
formed until the summer of 1944), and it ran a theft ring of Allied
weapons, “as if paid by Hitler himself,” as one British official
bitterly described it.

It is worth noting that the Foreign Secretary in the years leading up to
1948, Ernest Bevin, was uniformly hated by the Zionists — but it was
only after he publicly distinguished between Jews and Zionists that he
became a specific target of Zionist assassination.

Today, only Palestinians remain victims of Israeli assassination, but
anyone shining daylight on Zionism are targets for character
assassination. Such daylight would expose that it is Zionism itself, not most
victims of its smears, that is anti-Semitic.

1941:
the "Jerusalem Agreement", a foiled deal between Lehi ('Stern Gang') and
the Italian Fascists

(...) Lehi made little distinction between the Allied and the Axis powers, and
therefore saw no reason to restrain its terror during the war. “Sensible
Jews”, the group reasoned, “may well look to remain in a relatively good
position in Palestine after a German victory”. In late 1940 Stern sought
a Nazi-Lehi alliance, and when the Nazis failed to respond he sent his
friend and fellow ex-Irgun member Nathan Yellin-Mor to try again.
Yellin-Mor, a future Knesset member, advocated striking the British in
Palestine while Britain was weakened battling the Nazis—obviously
weakening that battle as well.101

The Italian fascists were also wooed by Lehi and, briefly, by Weizmann,
who met with Benito Mussolini with the idea that a relationship with the
fascists might serve as a bargaining chip against the British. Lehi,
however, pursued a formal agreement with the fascists during the war,
and was allegedly providing the Italian Commission in Syria with
military information.

Lehi’s collusion with the Italian fascists was codified in the
“Jerusalem Agreement 1940”. It proposed that the fascists help them
overthrow the British in Palestine, and then use “all the means in its
power to liquidate the Jewish Diaspora”—that is, for the fascists to
destroy all non-Palestinian Jewish communities on Lehi’s behalf and
forcibly transfer their populations to the Zionist settlements. The
agreement, dated 15 September 1940, required the signatures of the
Italians and the “Provisional Jewish Prime Minister”. In a comical
stroke of bad luck, however, the contact through whom Lehi was
negotiating was also engaged as an Irgun spy, and learning of the
negotiations, the Irgun tried to secure the document to embarrass its
rival. “Some hitch”, a British Security Officer wrote, “the nature of
which is not known”, kept the document from being signed. Lehi’s
sympathies veered again to the Nazis.102

These “pro-Axis terrorists”, as the London Times referred to Lehi,
sought, in their command group’s words, to “clean the city streets from
every person who wears a uniform which means he is British”. While
‘wearing a uniform’ automatically marked someone as an enemy, anyone
seen as an obstacle was vulnerable. Most victims of Zionist
assassinations (i.e., targeted rather than indiscriminate), whether by
Lehi, the Irgun, or the Hagana, were Jews.103

(Scroll down for documents related to the Jerusalem Agreement in the National Archives
[Kew], WO 275/121)

(...)
The increasing ethnic disenfranchisement was described by a young
American named Paul Siegel in 1937, based on what he learned from “a
couple of fellows” who had “been in Palestine since the beginning of
Jewish colonization there”. They had left Palestine because of their
political beliefs and, like Siegel, were in Spain fighting against
Franco’s emerging fascism.77

“They have been giving me”, Siegel wrote home, “some first-hand
information about the place [Palestine] that I’m sure will interest ...
the Siegel family”.

[Jewish settlers’] chauvinism towards the
Arabs is even greater than that of Hitler Germany toward the Jews. No
Arabs are allowed in Jewish cities—there is not a single Arab in Tel
Aviv. No Arabs are permitted to work for Jews. If a Jew & an Arab are
seen walking together, both are punished [by the Jewish settlers], tho
the Arab is punished much more severely than the Jew. No Arabs are
allowed in the Jewish Trade Unions.78

Siegel, who died in the fight against Franco, wrote that the “small
minds [of ] Hitler, Mussolini and Franco ... could not see that the
people of the world will not submit to their terror and hatred any
longer”. That refusal to submit to terror had led to an international
boycott of Germany, which faced economic ruin from poor exports— until
the boycott was broken by the Zionists in 1933, just after the Nazis
came to power, in a scheme formalised as the Haavara Transfer Agreement.
The idea was that Jews leaving Germany for Palestine would be able to
recover some of their assets by using those assets to purchase German
manufactured goods, which they could then resell. It was first tried in
May of 1933, four months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of
Germany, by a Zionist citrus firm named Hanotaiah.

The Nazis saw a formal transfer arrangement with the Zionists as their
only way to defeat the debilitating boycott. Encouraged by Germany’s
Gestapo, Foreign Office, and Interior Ministry, Zionist representatives
lobbied to break the anti-Nazi boycott, justifying the betrayal by
saying that they did not wish to take “political positions” that might
compromise their settler project:

Zionism must concern itself exclusively
with the building of the National Home in Palestine, and cannot afford
to take political positions against individual states.79

And so in August, 1933, the World Zionist Congress approved the Haavara
Transfer Agreement. The Agreement is spun as the result of pained
soul-searching over an impossible moral dilemma: enable some Jews to
leave Germany while empowering the Nazis, versus a boycott that might
spare millions—or might save no one. The point of the Agreement,
however, was not getting out the people themselves, but getting part of
their assets out with them, much of which went to the Zionist settlement
project.*

Rescue for its own sake was never part of Jewish Agency policy, and
nothing in its history suggests that its decision to break the boycott
was based on a tortured balancing of the moral quandary. The settler
project remained the guiding factor, and so the Agreement restricted
Jewish evacuation only to Palestine. Four years later, the Nazis still
wooed a contact in the Hagana, Feivel Polkes, with the lure that they
would pressure Jewish groups in Germany “to oblige Jews ... to go
exclusively to Palestine, and not to other countries”.80

Polkes met with Adolf Eichmann in Berlin and claimed that he could
supply intelligence on the British, French, and Italians, as well as
help the Nazis secure a source of oil—in exchange for channelling Jewish
emigrants (only) to Palestine. Polkes welcomed Eichmann at Haifa’s port
when he visited Palestine in October of 1937, but had only got so far as
to give him a tour of a kibbutz when the British learned of the Nazi
official’s presence. Expelled from Palestine, Eichmann went to Egypt,
accompanied by Polkes.

Nazi files captured by the US at the close of World War II shed some
light on what Eichmann learned from his Hagana host. “In Jewish
nationalist [i.e., Zionist] circles”, Eichmann reported, “people were
very pleased with the radical German policy”, since it helped achieve “a
[ Jewish] numerical superiority over the Arabs”. It was however
difficult to get German Jews to stay in Palestine once there, as most
wanted to go elsewhere. To prevent this, “those Jews coming from
Germany, after taking away their capital, should be put in a communal
settlement”. The Hagana’s records on Polkes are closed.81

* There are other flaws in the alleged ‘moral’ rationale for breaking
the anti-Nazi boycott. If at-risk Jews were the actual driving concern,
and if it made sense to buy their freedom even though doing so
strengthened the Nazis, the capital that the Agency received from the
deal would have been put into buying the freedom of Jews without the
minimum assets necessary for participation in the Haavara scheme, not
building the settler state. Further, according to Brenner (Age of
Dictators), “two-thirds of all German Jews who applied for certificates
[during Nazi rule] were turned down” by the Zionists in favour of
‘better’ settlers from the US and UK who were at no risk. He also states
that between 1933-1939, fully 60% of the money invested in Zionist
settlement came from breaking the anti-Nazi boycott.

ENDNOTES:77. TNA, CO 733/250/1,
pencilled ‘2’, ‘9’; regarding Zionists’ refusal to work withPalestinians, see also reference in Report on
his Britannic Majesty’s Governmenton the Administration Under Mandate of
Palestine and Transjordan for the year1926, 60, which cites strikes stemming from
“the refusal of Jewish labourersto work with Arabs” (TNA, CO 1071/306).78. MS letter, Paul Siegel,
July 18 1937, Albacete, Spain. Elmer Holmes BobstLibrary, NY. Downloaded Nov 1, 2011. I am
grateful to Prof. Francis Manasekfor bringing this letter to my attention. For
references to the violence andchaos within the Jewish settlements, see
e.g., TNA, WO 169/183.79. Nicosia, Third Reich,
53. Business interests also led some German Jews evento refute claims that the Nazis were
ill-treating Jews; see Nadan Feldman,‘The Jews Who Opposed Boycotting Nazi
Germany’, Haaretz, 20 Apr 2015.80. Nicosia, Third Reich, ch
3, and 50, 63; Black, Transfer Agreement; Brenner,51 Documents; Polkehn, ‘Secret Contacts’, 72;
When on 8 September 1939Haavara announced its closing, it had
transferred US $35 million, whichis about $600m in 2016 dollars, using the
value of 1936 dollars (see JewishTelegraphic Agency, 10 Sept 1939); Brenner,
Age of Dictators, Kindle 2559-2561; My thanks to Joseph Massad, Professor
of Modern Arab Politics andIntellectual History, for his email
correspondence regarding the Brennerreference, May 2016.81. Brenner, 51 Documents,
115-118; Nicosia, Third Reich, 62; It is not clear towhat extent Polkes was operating
independently or representing the Hagana.Brenner, quoting the custodian of the Hagana
records, said the files on Polkesare closed “because it would be too
embarrassing” (51 Documents, 111, 117).There is inconsistency in records as to
whether Polkes went with Eichmannto Egypt, or met him there again after
travelling separately.

The following images are of documents held by the National Archives
(Kew) relating to the Jerusalem Agreement of 1940: